Andrea Fraser, “What do I, as an artist, provide?” - Kemper Art Museum

Andrea Fraser,
“What do I,
as an artist,
provide?”

Andrea Fraser,
“What do I,
as an artist,
provide?”
o I,
rtist,
?”
“If you haven’t already done so, walk away from the desk where you picked up this
guide and out into the great, high space of the atrium. Isn’t this a wonderful place? It’s
uplifting. It’s like a Gothic cathedral. You can feel your soul rise up with the building
around you.” These are the first words of the official audio guide at the Guggenheim
Bilbao Museum as heard on Andrea Fraser’s video Little Frank and His Carp
(2001). Shot with hidden cameras, Fraser’s seven-minute video piece documents an
unauthorized intervention into the museum designed by the architect Frank Gehry,
the “Little Frank” of the video’s title. During the course of her visit, Fraser listens
raptly to the words on the audio guide and experiences what can be described
euphemistically as an intense identification with the museum. As the recording
rambles on about the glories of this revolutionary architecture, never mentioning the
art it contains, Fraser’s face expresses a range of exaggerated emotional states [FIG
1]. When the guide discusses how the great museums of previous ages made visitors
feel as if there was no escape from their endless series of corridors, Fraser frowns
and looks pensive. When she is told that at the Guggenheim “there is an escape,”
she smiles and appears reassured, but soon furrows her brow when the guide admits
that “modern art is demanding, complicated, bewildering.” She quickly bursts into
a grin of relief when she is told that “the museum tries to make you feel at home, so
you can relax and absorb what you see more easily.” The less than subtle implication
here is that instead of providing a refuge for contemplation, the museum now moves
away from discussing art to turn narcissistically to itself and its affective architecture,

A n d r e a F r a s e r
FIG 1: Stills from Little Frank and His Carp, 2001

“ W h at d o I , a s a n a r t i s t, p r o v i d e ? ”
physically and emotionally overwhelming the visitor with its spectacular spaces and
grand scale.
As the tour continues, the male voice on the audio guide invites Fraser to reach out
and touch the “powerfully sensual” curves of the atrium’s walls. The camera follows
her as she willingly obeys and soon, what began as light strokes gives way to a
passionate connection with the architecture [FIG 2]. She lifts her dress up above
her waist, revealing only a white thong, and begins humping one of Gehry’s hi-tech
pillars. Eventually, other museum-goers come into view, stopping and staring with
mild interest at this overtly sexual display. However, they appear more perplexed
than shocked, as if they were the unsuspecting participants in a gag akin to those
played out on Candid Camera or America’s Funniest Home Videos. 1
Little Frank and His Carp is a send-up of contemporary museological seduction that
highlights two of Fraser’s most identifiable strategies: provocative performance that
focuses insistently on the body of the artist herself, and incisive institutional analysis.
Since the mid-1980s, Fraser has achieved renown for her work in critiquing institutions
and dramatizing a desiring relationship between art and its audiences. Influenced
by feminism, psychoanalysis, appropriation art, and site-specificity, her practice has
often centered on sociological performance and discursive analysis of various art
world positions and postures: the docent, the curator, the visitor, the collector, the
critic, the art historian, and, as the title of this exhibition suggests, the artist.
Fraser is associated with a third generation of practitioners of institutional critique, a
practice that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s in reaction to the growing
commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art’s autonomy and universality.
Closely related to conceptual and site-specific art, institutional critique is concerned
with the disclosure and demystification of how the artistic subject as well as the
art object are staged and reified by the art institution. Fraser’s work is differentiated
from a first wave of critical practitioners—Michael Asher, Daniel Buren, Marcel
Broodthaers, Hans Haacke—in that she treats the institution as a set of positions and
social relations rather than a physical site in which institutional power can be clearly
located. Her practice answers to a more sociological and psychoanalytic model than
the phenomenological and spatial models proffered by her predecessors. Fraser’s
1 Helen Molesworth previously
noted the gag effect of Fraser’s
video. See Molesworth, Image
Stream (Columbus: Wexner
Center for the Arts, 2003), 15.

A n d r e a F r a s e r
FIG 2: Stills from Little Frank and His Carp, 2001

“ W h at d o I , a s a n a r t i s t, p r o v i d e ? ”
earliest works emerged out of 1980s appropriation art, as practiced by Sherrie Levine,
Allan McCollum, and Louise Lawler, among others, yet she extends this gesture to
include not only the appropriation of objects, images, and texts, but also positions,
forms, and functions.
In an era marked by the rise of the corporate mega-museum and the global art
market, the notion of the “institution” has been vastly expanded to include corporate
sponsorship, international biennials and art fairs, the increasing professionalization
of the art field, and the rise of supranational museum brands. 2 Artists who endeavor
to pursue a politicized artistic practice are forced to ask themselves, On what basis
is it now possible to evaluate, let alone critique, let alone resist, these trends? If the
historical avant-garde’s models of resistance now seem untenable and the critical
engagements of the 1960s and 1970s are no longer applicable, what strategies might
be found to navigate the artistic field as it exists today?
These questions abound as artists, curators, critics, and theorists continue to
reassess the viability of a practice of institutional critique in light of the staggering
proliferation of the institution brought about by both public demand and by politicians
and corporations. 3 French artist Daniel Buren recently suggested that through
global proliferation, art institutions have actually lost their definitional power and
authority, as they are no longer the chief administrators of value, but rather assume a
central role in an ever more diverse culture industry. 4 Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson,
in accordance with Buren, has asserted that we are living in a moment when there is
no “outside” and when the museum has become “a meaningless context in which to
perform critical exercises.” 5
Fraser’s position echoes that of Buren and Eliasson in that she too recognizes it is
no longer a question of being against or outside of the institution, for, in fact, “we
are the institution.” 6 Instead of simply relinquishing a belief in maintaining a practice
of resistance, however, Fraser turns institutional critique upon itself by enacting its
inherent contradictions and complicities. In recent years, she has taken to describing
her particular practice of institutional critique as an ethical one in that she does
not work in opposition to the institution so much as within it, interrogating, through
strategic interventions, the manner in which cultural producers not only critique but
2 The Guggenheim stands as the
pioneering model for the global,
corporate museum. Under the
leadership of Thomas Krens,
the museum has set out to
become an international chain
of satellite institutions operating
in semiautonomous fashion.
Abu Dhabi’s $27 billion tourist
and cultural development on
Saadiyat Island is currently set
to include a Guggenheim Abu
Dhabi, designed by Frank Gehry,
as well as a Louvre Abu Dhabi,
designed by Jean Nouvel. See
Alan Riding, “The Industry of
Art Goes Global,” The New York
Times (March 28, 2007).
3 This discussion has been played
out in numerous contemporary
art magazines and journals and
has been debated at several
conferences and symposia. In
2005 the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art hosted a
conference on institutional
critique in which Fraser
participated. This resulted in the
recent publication Institutional
Critique and After, ed. John C.
Welchman (Zürich: Jrp/Ringier;
Southern California Consortium
of Art Schools, 2007).
4 Daniel Buren, “In Conversation:
Daniel Buren & Olafur Eliasson,”
Artforum 43, no. 9 (May 2005):
210.
5 Olafur Eliasson, “In
Conversation: Daniel Buren &
Olafur Eliasson,” Artforum 43,
no. 9 (May 2005): 210.
6 Andrea Fraser, “From the
Critique of Institutions to an
Institution of Critique,” Artforum
44, no. 1 (September 2005): 283.

A n d r e a F r a s e r
also participate in the reproduction of relations of power. 7 Fraser does not flinch at
implicating herself as a willing participant in this system and eschews the notion of
critical distance. By inhabiting rather than idealistically transcending the ambiguities
associated with contemporary manifestations of institutional critique, she makes this
conflict an unmistakable part of her work.
What we are left with is an artistic practice that no longer expresses certainty or
transparency—what once defined politicized artistic practice—but rather one that
pointedly articulates and exemplifies ambivalence and contradiction, leaving the
question of meaning somewhat open and malleable. Indeed, after watching Little
Frank and His Carp, one may find it humorous and engaging, while overlooking the
critical intent that underpins the work. In her 2003 essay, “‘Isn’t This a Wonderful
Place?’ (A Tour of the Guggenheim Bilbao),” the artist perceptively examines Gehry’s
museum as an inevitable example of the success of museum-driven urban revitalization
plans and the effects of global tourism, yet there appears to be a disjuncture
between the rigorously theoretical position she conveys in her text and the alluring
video. 8 In what follows, this essay will examine the complex relationship between
theory and practice that has come to define Fraser’s particular brand of institutional
critique. Specific focus will be placed on the manner in which the artist productively
holds certain dichotomies in tension—concepts / seduction, intellect / emotion,
affirmation / resistance—creating provocations that challenge and expose contemporary
systems of artistic production and consumption from within.
* * *
As demonstrated in the range of works making up this exhibition, Fraser’s primary
strategies have included the parody of various subject positions and institutionalized
forms within the art world (the exhibition brochure, the museum tour, the welcome
speech), the superimposition of images, texts, and interests to produce often discordant
results, and the excessive enactment of affect and intense emotional experience
as evidenced in contemporary art and art discourse. In order for her analytic strategies
to remain relevant for a contemporary context, she continues to revisit, revise,
and pursue new approaches that parallel shifting sociocultural, economic, and
political contexts.
7 Andrea Fraser, “Art at the
Intersection of Social Fields,” in
Visual Worlds, ed. John R. Hall,
Blake Stimson, and Lisa Tamiris
Becker (London: Routledge,
2005), 72.
8 Andrea Fraser, “‘Isn’t This a
Wonderful Place?’ (A Tour
of a Tour of the Guggenheim
Bilbao),” Museum Highlights:
The Writings of Andrea
Fraser, ed. Alexander Alberro
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005),
233–60. Fraser’s writings are
an inherent part of her artistic
practice that span several
genres, including art criticism,
performance scripts, tributes,
essays that examine public and
private institutions, and more
theoretical investigations.

“ W h at d o I , a s a n a r t i s t, p r o v i d e ? ”
FIG 3: Woman I / Madonna and Child 1506–1967, 1984

A n d r e a F r a s e r
FIG 4: Untitled (de Kooning/
Raphael Drawing) #3,
1984/2005
FIG 5: Untitled (Pollock/Titian) #4, 1984/2005

“ W h at d o I , a s a n a r t i s t, p r o v i d e ? ”
One of the earliest works of Fraser’s career took the form of an artist’s book entitled
Woman I / Madonna and Child 1506–1967 (1984) [FIG 3], a parody of an exhibition
brochure meant only for distribution in museum and art bookstores. To produce the
brochure she wove together appropriated fragments from art historical monographs
on the work of Willem de Kooning and Raphael. The cover superimposes the
signatures of both artists, while the seven color plates include “reproductions”
created by layering slides of de Kooning’s paintings of “Women” and Raphael’s
paintings of the “Madonna and Child.” The book calls attention to and disrupts
the normative representations of unified artistic subjects and, in particular, how
that construction is articulated in relation to representations of women. In layering
these stylistically opposed paintings she visually collapses the Madonna / whore
dichotomy running throughout much of Western art and directly targets the patriarchal
veneration of Renaissance and Modern masters. This project was also most
certainly prompted by the return of neo-expressionist painting in the 1980s and
the often inflated macho rhetoric surrounding the associated practices of gestural
painting.
Until very recently, the images created in association with this project were explicitly
never intended to be reproduced and reified as discrete photographic prints. However,
in 2005, Fraser returned to these images and produced a series of editioned C-prints
for sale through a commercial gallery. 9 By reappropriating her own appropriations,
she internalized her earlier critique while simultaneously working to upend it. While
the juxtaposition of a Pollock painting with one by Titian in Untitled (Pollock / Titian)
#4 (1984/2005) [FIG 5] results in an undeniably sensual image, other works, such
as those juxtaposing Raphael and de Kooning images [FIGS 4,6,7], read as overtly
violent distortions of canonical images of women painted by men in different artistic
eras. What Fraser successfully creates with these images is a palimpsest of irreconcilable
interests, resulting in a deliberately constructed form of dissonance that she
aptly describes as “grotesque.” 10
Fraser gained early fame with her parodic performances as Jane Castleton, a
volunteer docent with a dilettante’s knowledge of art, whose tour of collection
highlights at the Philadelphia Museum of Art superimposed the discourses of the
nineteenth-century art museum and the poor house, producing a witty critique of the
9 In preparation for her 2003
retrospective, Fraser went
through all of her works and
rediscovered this early series
of superimposed images. She
decided to produce those
images that were not originally
included in the 1984 exhibition
brochure as C-prints. These
include juxtapositions of works
by Jackson Pollock and Titian as
well as de Kooning and Raphael.
(Andrea Fraser, in a telephone
conversation with the author,
April 4, 2007.)
10 Bennett Simpson, “Fantasies of
the Knowable Object: Interview
with Andrea Fraser,” Purple, no.
12 (Summer 2002): 146.

A n d r e a F r a s e r
10
FIG 6: Untitled (de Kooning/Raphael) #2, 1984/2005

“ W h at d o I , a s a n a r t i s t, p r o v i d e ? ”
11
FIG 7: Untitled (de Kooning/Raphael) #1, 1984/2005

A n d r e a F r a s e r
12
museum as an institution for the discipline of classes without taste [FIG 8]. Instead
of manipulating a presentational format produced by the museum, Fraser’s docent
performances involved the complex activities of scripting, rehearsing, and exaggeratedly
enacting the conflicted position of the museum’s representative. Museum
Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989) extends the mode of art-as-critical research
developed by artists such as Hans Haacke and Louise Lawler in that it exists as
a performance, a videotape, and an extensively researched text constructed of
quotations from archival sources and museum publications. 11 Although she appears
knowledgeable, Jane’s tour effectively negates the didactic function of the institution
in that she refuses to convey to the public what it is they want or desire from the
museum. Instead, Jane offers a seemingly schizophrenic yet subversive layering
of disparate descriptions of the art in the museum, of the museum building, of the
people of Philadelphia, of the museum’s founders, and of the museum’s mission.
Fraser’s tour exists not only as an ironic re-presentation of institutional discourse, but
also as a strategic move away from the work of art and towards the social relations
that surround art objects.
While Michel Foucault’s work on prison systems and Sigmund Freud’s concept of
psychoanalytic transference provided the theoretical foundations for Fraser’s docent
performances, it is French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the role of culture in
the wielding of symbolic power as a source of domination and social differentiation
that most profoundly informs her practice to date. Between the mid-1960s and his
death in 2002, Bourdieu explored the hierarchies and conflicts of the art world. In The
Field of Cultural Production (1993), his most comprehensive text on the subject, he
depicts the art world as a “field of struggles” where agents—artists, critics, curators,
dealers, collectors, academics—engage in competition for control of interests and
resources, and where “belief in the value of the work” is part of the reality of the
work. 12 Bourdieu understood the work of art as a manifestation of the cultural field as
a whole, “in which all the powers of the field, and all the determinisms inherent in its
structure and functioning, are concentrated.” 13
It was Bourdieu’s reflexive methodology, perhaps even more than his account of the
cultural field, that turned Fraser into an enthusiast. Reflexivity is one of the major
tenets of Bourdieu’s sociological practice, and Fraser has openly credited this
11 Fraser’s script for “Museum
Highlights: A Gallery Talk”
was first published in October
57 (Summer 1991): 104–22,
and includes stage directions,
epigraphs, and extensive
footnotes.
12 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of
Cultural Production: Essays on
Art and Literature (New York:
Columbia University Press,
1993), 37.
13 Ibid. Although Bourdieu is
recognized for his published
book in collaboration with
Haacke (Free Exchange, 1995),
few scholars of contemporary
art have engaged with his
theories of the art world.
While some see his work as an
attack on the discipline of art
history, others note an implicit
circularity in his theories,
claiming his approach is better
at analyzing how culture works
to legitimate a status quo than
at examining the complexities
of social change or rupture, and
thus induces at times a sense of
political paralysis. See Richard
Hooker, Dominic Paterson, and
Paul Stirton, “Bourdieu and
the Art Historians,” in Reading
Bourdieu on Society and Culture,
ed. Bridget Fowler (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 2000),
212–27; and Nick Prior, “Having
Ones’ Tate and Eating It:
Transformations of the Museum
in a Hypermodern Era,” in Art
and Its Publics: Museum Studies
and the Millennium, ed. Andrew
McClellan (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 2003), 61.

“ W h at d o I , a s a n a r t i s t, p r o v i d e ? ”
13
FIG 8: Still from Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989

A n d r e a F r a s e r
14
aspect of his work with convincing her of “the fallacy of any attempt to think of art
outside of or opposed to its institutions.” 14 According to Bourdieu, failure to objectify
and analyze the relationship between the analyzer and his or her object of analysis
can result in the analyzer (read: artist, curator, art historian) assuming a privileged
position and effacing relations of power that may be inherent in the relationship. In
her extensive writings, which are a central part of Fraser’s critical practice, the artist
repeatedly reveals just how thoroughly she has internalized Bourdieu’s methods. 15
“Every time we speak of the ‘institution’ as other than ‘us’ we disavow our role in
the creation and perpetuation of its conditions,” she explained in a 2005 article in
Artforum. “We avoid responsibility for, or action against, the everyday complicities,
compromises, and censorship…which are driven by our own interests in the field
and the benefits we derive from it.” 16 In turning institutional critique upon itself, she
brings psychological depth to Bourdieu’s sociological analysis by constantly asking
what it is we want from art. “All of my work is about what we want from art, what
collectors want, what artists want from collectors, what museum audiences want,”
she recently explained. “By that, I mean what we want not only economically, but in
more personal, psychological and affective terms.” 17
With her turn to project-based work in the 1990s, Fraser abandoned the character of
Jane Castleton and moved away from her singular focus on the context of the museum
and gallery. In her Preliminary Prospectuses (1993), she attempted to formalize a
model of artistic practice as “service provision,” explicitly rejecting the production of
discrete art objects in favor of a focused engagement with the social relations that
subtend the production of works of art. Paralleling the emergent service economy,
Fraser as “herself,” meaning as an artist, offered consulting services to be rendered
to institutions on a contractual basis. Her four preliminary prospectuses functioned
as both contracts and performance scripts in that they announced her availability for
critical services on a per-project basis to individual collectors and corporations, as
well as to “cultural constituency organizations” (foundations) and “general audience
institutions” (public art programs). The consult involved two phases, the first being
“interpretive,” including a site visit to the client’s home or office, and the second being
“interventionary,” which included concepts for a private or public installation and
additions to a given collection, among other possibilities. For the contracts, Fraser
14 Andrea Fraser in Gregg
Bordowitz and Andrea Fraser,
“What Do We Want from Art
Anyway?: A Conversation,”
Artwurl, no. 6 (August 2004),
http://artwurl.org/aw_past_
interviews.html.
15 Although Fraser’s texts can
be read on their own and
are published in academic
journals, art magazines, and
numerous edited volumes,
they are intimately bound to
her performances and videos,
building a rich dialogue among
the many facets of her critical
practice.
16 Fraser, “From the Critique of
Institutions,” 283.
17 Andrea Fraser, as quoted in
Guy Trebay, “Sex, Art and
Videotape,” The New York Times
(June 13, 2004).

“ W h at d o I , a s a n a r t i s t, p r o v i d e ? ”
self-consciously appropriated aspects from the field of professional consulting—its
forms and dry language—and achieved a humorously illogical result based on the
exaggerated use of the very excesses of rationalized bureaucratic organizations. 18
See, for example, the following passage from her prospectus for corporations:
Corporations developing art collections—whether directly or through
corporate foundations—often find that this activity becomes a source of
discord within their organization. Conflicts arise between the consultant
or staff member in charge of the collection and his or her corporate board
of directors. Employees with an otherwise strong identification with the
corporate culture resist the installation of art objects in their workplace.
Clients are intimidated or confused when confronted by works outside of
their cultural frame of reference.
15
This passage reads as both subversive and comical in its unflattering depiction of
the client, yet also highlights one of the fundamental contradictions of avant-garde
tradition: artistic transgression is often aimed at the same individuals and institutions
that provide artists with support. Unlike so-called “hardcore” traditions of institutional
critique that attempt to position artistic freedom against institutionalization,
Fraser entered into direct collaboration with corporations in order to find out how art’s
autonomy functions or fails to function within such a context. What she found was
that the relative autonomy of the artist was the very condition of the symbolic profit
derived from corporate sponsorship. While Fraser gained professional prestige from
having her name publicized by a particular organization, that organization acquired
an equal amount of public prestige by having its name associated with a particular
kind of art. In the end, what she offered her clients (museums, corporations, private
collectors) was the symbolic value of legitimacy produced by artistic status, what
Bourdieu distinguishes as “cultural capital.” By presenting these various interests in
such a straightforward manner, Fraser not only exposed the systems that distribute,
present, and collect art, but also expressly implicated her own desire for professional
recognition as a crucial part of the process as well.
Fraser’s critique of art’s autonomy as a specialized field should not be construed
as a rejection of it. While she is one of the toughest critics of autonomy she is also,
18 Fraser’s A Project in Two Phases
(1994–95), undertaken for
the Generali Foundation in
April 1994, remains her central
project-based work concerning
artistic autonomy as a basis for
artistic legitimacy. See Fraser,
“Art at the Intersection,” 72–79.

A n d r e a F r a s e r
16
paradoxically, one of its most determined defenders. Fraser actively interrogates
the partial and ideological character of artistic freedom and the uses to which it
is employed—by artists, institutions, and others—in order to secure the relatively
autonomous field of artistic production as a possible locus of resistance to the logic,
values, and power of the market. Her work does not register a melancholic loss of
autonomy, but rather attempts to articulate the different relations, as she puts it,
“within which it is caught in the hopes of disturbing, if not facilitating a transformation
of these systems.” 19
At the end of the 1990s, as institutional interest in site-oriented practices such as
Fraser’s grew, a strange reversal began to take place in which the artist came to
approximate the “work,” instead of the artwork functioning as surrogate for the artist,
as is commonly assumed. 20 The analytical self-instrumentalization implied in many
site-specific practices became increasingly functionalized in the service of institutional
self-promotion. For example, after the critical and popular success of Fred
Wilson’s initial site-specific project Mining the Museum, undertaken at the Maryland
Historical Society in 1992, the commissioning of artists to rehang permanent collections
as a form of subversive service became a familiar museological practice. 21
Under these conditions, criticism turned into spectacle and marketing, and the idea
that one could resist commodification by refusing to produce art objects appeared
increasingly untenable.
By 2001, in a move that some have described as selling out, Fraser began producing
self-contained video pieces for exhibition and sale in commercial art galleries. This
shift, however, was less a transparent embrace of the mainstream art market than a
change in strategy whereby the artist adapts her practice and assimilates contemporary
developments in the cultural field in order to effect a change from within. “If you
want to transform relations,” Fraser explains, “the only chance you have is to intervene
in those relations in their enactment, as they are produced and reproduced.” 22 In her
recent works, the artist walks a rather precarious line between resistance and participation,
holding this contradiction at play and thus making it a key part of her work.
Just as her initial engagement with images was triggered, in part, by the rise of neoexpressionist
painting, Fraser’s current production of video work has been prompted
19 Andrea Fraser, as quoted
in Miwon Kwon, “What Do
I, As an Artist, Provide?: A
Conversation,” Documents,
no. 23 (Spring 2004): 32.
20 See Miwon Kwon, One Place
After Another: Site-Specific
Art and Locational Identity
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002),
47.
21 In that same year, Fraser was
invited by Lawrence Rinder,
the curator of contemporary
art at the University Art
Museum, University of
California, Berkeley, to create
an installation with objects
from the museum’s permanent
collection. Aren’t They Lovely?
(1992) was developed using
objects that were part of a
bequest by Thérèse Bonney.
22 Andrea Fraser, interview by
Andrew Hunt, “Is This a Sitespecific
Interview?,” Untitled,
no. 32 (Summer 2004): 2ff.

“ W h at d o I , a s a n a r t i s t, p r o v i d e ? ”
by the boom in video installation in the late 1990s. Although she produced several
single-channel performance-based tapes earlier in the decade as unlimited editions,
she always refused to project them. It was only at the point when video projection
assumed a particular cultural currency, used not only in the context of sporting
events, rock concerts, and corporate presentations, but by museums as a form of
dramatic self-promotion and by artists as a means of creating spectacular, immersive
experiences, that Fraser felt free to appropriate it as an institutionalized form. 23
Since this latest shift in practice, she has started to describe herself as a “formerly
hardcore practitioner of institutional critique” and her new work as “more focused
on artists than institutions” in that it takes as its subject the art world’s production of
and the market’s appropriation of particular kinds of artistic subjectivity. 24 The video
Official Welcome (2001) [FIG 9] most directly articulates this change in approach. The
piece is fundamentally about the ambivalence of artists, Fraser included, who want
to be wanted and loved for what they do, even in their transgressions and critiques.
Official Welcome was originally a thirty-minute performance commissioned by the
MICA Foundation in New York City. MICA’s program includes the commission of
one major project a year, which is then introduced with an “official welcome” at the
private home of the founders. Fraser appropriated this traditionally convivial practice
for the project itself and presented the piece in front of a room full of collectors and
patrons. The actual performance was conceived to be adapted to different sites, and
in the video shown at the Kemper Art Museum, Fraser performs within the exhibition
space of her 2003 retrospective at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany. 25 She
begins by thanking everyone for attending while matter-of-factly explaining to the
audience how these kinds of introductions are among the rituals of incorporation
and exchange that so much of her work is about, and that she facetiously wishes,
at times like these, on the occasion of her first major retrospective, that she could
perform these rituals without distance and without reflection. As she speaks, her
video installation Soldadera (1998/2001) plays in the background, which also focuses
on the complicated ties between artists and their benefactors, thus layering not only
her critique, but her physical image as well. 26
17
When experienced as a video projection in the gallery space, every viewer who enters
the room in which Official Welcome is shown is simultaneously implicated in the
23 Helen Molesworth notes that
“the reciprocity between what
might be defined as art world
concerns and spectacle culture
is a defining characteristic
of contemporary projected
images.” See Molesworth, Image
Stream, 14.
24 Andrea Fraser, as quoted
by John Miller, “Go For It!”
in Exhibition: Andrea Fraser
(Vancouver: Morris and Helen
Belkin Art Gallery, 2002), 45.
25 The introduction is rewritten
for each live performance based
on press materials generated for
the specific event.
26 Soldadera (Scenes from Un
Banquete en Tetlapayac, A
Film by Olivier Debroise),
produced and directed by
Andrea Fraser (two channel
DVD installation, 1998/2001).
The source of Fraser’s imagery is
the experimental documentary
Un Banquete en Tetlapayac,
written and directed by Olivier
Debroise and photographed
by Rafael Ortega (DVD, 1998).
Debroise’s film stars, among
others, Andrea Fraser as a
revolutionary peasant / woman
in the audience (Frances Flynn
Paine), Cuauhtémoc Medina
as a revolutionary worker, and
Lutz Becker as a revolutionary
intellectual. For more on
Soldadera, see Andrea Fraser,
Works: 1984 to 2003, ed. Yilmaz
Dziewior (Cologne: DuMont,
2003), 222–27, and James
Meyer, “The Strong and the
Weak: Andrea Fraser and the
Conceptual Legacy,” Grey Room
17 (Fall 2004): 82–107.

A n d r e a F r a s e r
18
FIG 9: Stills from Official Welcome, 2001 (Hamburg version, 2003)

“ W h at d o I , a s a n a r t i s t, p r o v i d e ? ”
work, physically drawn in by the life-size projection of Fraser’s body and effectively
becoming part of her audience. Unlike some contemporary video projects that
follow an exacting installation format, Official Welcome exists in an unlimited edition,
expressly undermining the creation of an unreproducible, singularized viewing
experience. 27
Following her introductory remarks, the artist quickly and imperceptibly shifts roles,
mimicking the personae of nine different pairs of artists and their supporters. Her
carefully scripted performance, culled from fragments of artists’ statements, interviews,
critics’ essays, and curators’ speeches, is at once funny, disruptive, engaging, and, at
times, downright discomfiting. 28 Halfway through the piece, she assumes the persona
of a troubled post-feminist art star, begins to undress, and flatly states “I’m not a
person today. I’m an object in an art work. It’s about emptiness.” She then steps out
from behind the podium and poses for a few seconds in her bra and underwear in the
style of a Vanessa Beecroft model. Thus, in addition to appropriating artist statements
and interviews, she also parodies performance art. Just before concluding, Fraser
puts her clothes back on, both closing her quote and mitigating the subversive power
once associated with the avant-garde act of public denuding and its attack on the
boundaries traditionally separating what is public and what is private. The shock
factor appeared lost on the audience as well, which looked unmoved and devoid of
affect, as if the conditions of Fraser’s nudity and her overtly seductive and objectifying
performance were self-evident to everyone in attendance.
19
After spending most of the 1990s focused on the social and economic interests
invested in art, work like Official Welcome brings the focus emphatically back to
the artist’s body and can be interpreted as a reengagement with the more subjective
and gendered aspects of the art world. The figure of the irreverent “bad boy”
artist, epitomized by Damien Hirst, is juxtaposed with the likes of so-called “bad
girls” Tracey Emin and Kara Walker. Fraser’s performance also brings our attention
back to the symbiotic relationship between avant-garde transgression and its
patrons. Mimicking not only the words, but also the postures and affectations of
both contemporary artists and their supporters, Fraser frankly exposes avant-garde
transgression as a necessary element in the perpetuation of established rituals of
exchange between cultural and financial capital. 29
27 All of Fraser’s scripted
performances are issued in
unlimited edition videos.
The fact that these works are
distributed as unlimited editions
is intended to undermine future
speculation. The videos are not
produced for mass distribution,
but rather exist within a system
of licensing.
28 Fraser quoted or paraphrased
numerous sources, including
artists Matthew Barney, Kara
Walker, Andres Serrano, Karen
Finley, Thomas Hirschhorn, and
Damien Hirst; critics Benjamin
Buchloh, Jerry Saltz, Dave
Hickey, and Arthur Danto; and
celebrities Mel Brooks, Bill
Clinton, and Dennis Hopper.
29 See Miller, “Go For It!,” 38.

A n d r e a F r a s e r
20
FIG 10: Stills from A Visit to the Sistine Chapel, 2005

“ W h at d o I , a s a n a r t i s t, p r o v i d e ? ”
In Little Frank and His Carp and in her most recent video, A Visit to the Sistine Chapel
(2005) [FIG 10], Fraser no longer presents complex scripts constructed from meticulous
research, but more simply lets the museum speak for itself via its audio guide.
As a visitor to the Guggenheim and the Vatican, Fraser is immersed in the affective
climate generated by the audio guides, which support and augment, through
epideictic rhetoric, her immediate, physical experience of a given exhibition. The
soundtracks presented by each museum not only induce particular reasoning and
identifications on Fraser’s part, but also put her body in motion, drawing her through
a series of suggestions, emotions, and moods. 30 In both videos, she expresses an
excessive receptivity to the museums’ methods of seduction, performing actions
that, as the introduction to this essay made clear, were never intended.
21
A Visit to the Sistine Chapel is a fitting pendant piece to Little Frank and His Carp.
Whereas the audio guide at the Guggenheim Bilbao compelled an overtly sexual
response, the Vatican Museums’ elicits a more chaste and pious character. This
proves to be a challenging task, as the camera captures the artist’s attention being
constantly diverted by the ubiquitous museum gift shops that pop up around every
corner and by the sheer mass of tourists surrounding her, wearing headphones,
taking pictures, and making their own videos of their art experience. Fraser’s
videotaped visit to the Vatican effectively highlights the disparity between the type
of religious and contemplative encounter suggested by the audio guide and the
actual experience, which, due to the effects of mass tourism, is more akin to that of
an amusement park, complete with immense crowds corralled into long lines leading
up to the main attraction. 31
Fraser’s radical move away from her earlier project-based works and toward her
recent production of self-contained videos, with their focus on her body within the
affective museum environment, may also be interpreted, in part, as a reaction to the
current institutional promotion of “relational aesthetics” as well as to what Fraser has
derisively termed the “affective turn” in contemporary art and art discourse. Coined
by French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud in the late 1990s, “relational
aesthetics” describes artistic practices that engage with “the realm of human interactions
and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private
symbolic space.” 32 Artists such as Vanessa Beecroft, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tiravanija,
30 Jennifer Fisher’s introductory
examination of the function
of museum audio guides was
very helpful here. See her
“Speeches of Display: The
Museum Audioguides of Sophie
Calle, Andrea Fraser, and Janet
Cardiff,” Parachute, no. 94
(April/June 1999): 24.
31 The notion that major art
museums have become
entertainment centers that
must compete with malls, movie
theaters, and other leisure
complexes is a prominent one in
current museological discourses.
32 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational
Aesthetics, trans. Simon
Pleasance and Fronza Woods
(Paris: Les presses du reel,
2002), 14.

A n d r e a F r a s e r
22
Philippe Parreno, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres are frequently cited as practitioners of
relational aesthetics based on their creation of “free areas” and time spans whose
rhythms work against those that lead to increased social fragmentation and alienation
in everyday life. 33 The prevalence of these relational practices has been framed as
both a response to the shift from a goods-based to a service-based economy in the
1980s and 1990s and a direct reaction to the virtual relationships of the Internet and
globalization. The emphasis on immediate experience, collective spectator participation,
and conviviality recalls works from the 1960s, but Bourriaud explicitly distances
contemporary work from that of previous generations by claiming that today’s artists
have a different attitude towards social change: instead of trying to radically alter
their environment, he argues, artists create “various forms of modus vivendi permitting
fairer social relations;” social utopias and revolutionary hopes have given way to
“everyday micro-utopias.” 34
While Fraser’s service-based works of the 1990s were nominally related to the
practices just described in that they actively engaged with social relationships and
an art of discourse rather than an art of individual contemplation, she has since
explicitly positioned her own procedures in direct opposition to what she calls the
“neo-Fluxus practices” of relational aesthetics. 35 According to Fraser, the contemporary
institutionalization of relational aesthetics demonstrates the degree to which “the
avant-garde’s aim to integrate ‘art into life praxis’ has evolved into a highly ideological
form of escapism,” resulting in merely compensatory spaces for what is lacking
in everyday human relations. 36 Fraser is just one of many dissenting voices that have
questioned Bourriaud’s framing of a diversity of artistic procedures in recent years
for his seemingly nondialectical attempts to equate hospitality with democracy and
for his hopes to rebuild social infrastructures by providing moments of reciprocity
and inclusiveness. As suggested by art historian Hal Foster, for all its discursivity,
relational aesthetics and its emphasis on social experience may simply aestheticize
the more convivial procedures of our service economy—such as invitations,
meetings, and appointments—reproducing rather than critiquing its logic. 37
Bourriaud’s emphasis on micro-utopian communities and nonconflictual models of
social interactivity pursues a project of affect that relies on what some see as a
regressive return to a notion of authentic experience, disregarding postmodernist
33 Ibid., 15. Most of the artists
mentioned in Bourriaud’s book
were featured in his exhibition
Traffic at the Centre d’Arts
Plastiques Contemporain in
Bordeaux in 1993.
34 Ibid., 45.
35 Fraser, “From the Critique of
Institutions,” 283.
36 Ibid.
37 Hal Foster, “Chat Rooms (2004),”
reproduced in Participation,
ed. Claire Bishop (London:
Whitechapel Ventures Limited,
2006), 195. For more recent
critiques of Bourriaud’s relational
aesthetics, see Claire Bishop,
“Antagonism and Relational
Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall
2004): 51–79; and Walead
Beshty, “Neo-Avantgarde and
Service Industry: Notes on the
Brave New World of Relational
Aesthetics,” Texte zur Kunst, no.
59 (September 2005).

“ W h at d o I , a s a n a r t i s t, p r o v i d e ? ”
attempts to dismantle just such a notion. 38 The “affective turn” in contemporary art
and art discourse, in Fraser’s mind, merely provides a jargon of authenticity and
shared humanity in the face of an overwhelming alienation resulting from the total
commodification of the artistic field now free from local and national constraints. 39
As is typical of Fraser’s practice, even while she denigrates this turn her videos
are simultaneously implicated in it, sustaining a tension between collusion with and
performative critique of the elevated status of emotions in art and art experience.
During her visits to the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Vatican Museums, for instance,
she exaggerates to an absurd extent the manner in which these prepackaged audio
guides substitute sensuousness for concepts and emotions for intellect. She thus
amplifies the contradictions inherent in recent artistic and discursive developments
while consistently presenting herself as a self-conscious participant. The destabilizing
potential of Fraser’s work is located precisely in her ability to make the social,
economic, and psychological relations that subtend the existing artistic field manifest,
thus complicating one’s ability to simply perform the role or fulfill the function of the
visitor, the docent, the curator, the art historian, and of the artist within the changing
structures of today’s art world. As she has done throughout her career, Fraser asks
us to actively question what it is we really want from art.
23
Meredith Malone
Assistant Curator
38 There are a wide range of
practices and theories that are
summarily grouped under the
rubric “relational aesthetics.” In
some relational projects, affect
or affective reciprocity and
harmonious human exchange
are seen as the central methods
of achieving the micro-utopia
of which Bourriaud speaks.
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s food-based
events are among the most
prominent examples in which
participants are asked to
negotiate between the status of
passive consumers and that of
guests and protagonists. For an
insightful and critical reading
of Tiravanija’s work, see Janet
Kraynak, “Rirkrit Tiravanija’s
Liability,” Documents, no. 13
(Fall 1998): 26–40.
39 Andrea Fraser, “The Economy
of Affect,” Texte zur Kunst, no.
65 (March 2007): 156.

ndrea
Biography
Born 1965, Billings, Montana
School of Visual Arts, New York, 1982–84
24
Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program,
New York, 1984–85
New York University, New York, 1985–86
What d
s an a
rovide
Lives and works in Los Angeles
Andrea Fraser’s work is exhibited in both the United States and internationally.
She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including a mid-career retrospective,
Andrea Fraser, Works: 1984 to 2003, organized by the Kunstverein, Hamburg,
in 2003, and a survey of her video work presented by the Belkin Art Gallery,
University of British Columbia, in 2002. Fraser’s work is in public collections
worldwide, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museu d’Art
Contemporani, Barcelona; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery,
Berlin; and Tate Modern, London. She was a founding member of the feminist
performance group, The V-Girls (1986–96); the project-based artist initiative
Parasite (1997–98); and the cooperative art gallery Orchard (2005–present). In
2005, the MIT Press published Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea
Fraser. The artist recently relocated from New York to California to join the art
faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles.
This exhibition is the second in the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum’s Focus exhibition series, which
explores a theme, a single work, or a group of works by a single artist from the permanent collection.
Support for Andrea Fraser, “What do I, as an artist, provide?” was provided by the Hortense Lewin Art
Fund and members of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

Andrea Fraser, “What do I as an artist, provide?”
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
May 11–July 16, 2007
Exhibition Checklist
Woman I / Madonna and Child 1506–1967, 1984 (Ill. p. 7)
Artist book, color offset printing, 8 5 /8 x 9 15 /16"
Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
Untitled (de Kooning / Raphael) #1, 1984 / 2005 (Ill. p. 11)
Digital C-print, ed. 5, 40 x 30"
Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
Untitled (de Kooning / Raphael) #2, 1984 / 2005 (Ill. p. 10)
Digital C-print, ed. 5, 40 x 30"
Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
Untitled (de Kooning / Raphael Drawing) #3, 1984 / 2005 (Ill. p. 8)
Digital C-print, ed. 5, 40 x 30"
Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
Untitled (Pollock / Titian) #4, 1984 / 2005 (Ill. p. 8)
Digital C-print, ed. 5, 40 x 61"
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, University purchase, Parsons Fund, 2006
Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989 (Ill. p. 13)
DVD, 29 min.
Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
Preliminary Prospectuses, 1993
Presentation of various documentation materials: “For Individuals,”
“For Corporations,” “For Cultural Constituency Organizations,” and
“For General Audience Institutions”
Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
Little Frank and His Carp, 2001 (Ill. pp. 2, 4)
DVD NTSC, ed. 25, 6 min.
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, University purchase, Parsons Fund, 2006
Official Welcome, 2001 (Hamburg version, 2003) (Ill. p. 18)
Video installation of videotaped performance, 31 min.
Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
A Visit to the Sistine Chapel, 2005 (Ill. p. 20)
DVD, ed. 8, 12 min.
Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York